Colleen Francis

Sales Leader Expert
Ottawa / Miami, Ontario / Florida

What Colleen is Passionate About

In Pursuit of More: The New Rules for Sales Success from Cold Call to Repeat Customer

The rules have changed. The market is different and a new economy is emerging. Buyers have responded to these changes quickly and dramatically. Have your selling models evolved to profit from this change?

Too many sales people rely on sales tricks recycled from years ago. Out-dated tactics such as overly aggressive or persistent cold calling, too-polished canned presentations, flashy corporate brochures, and insincere, over-inflated or manipulative tricks to try and close business. In today’s new economy these approaches are not only sorely out of date, they’re woefully ineffective.

Today’s savvy buyers are looking to develop trusted, long-term relationships with their suppliers by demanding a new approach to sales that puts client results first, builds trust and loyalty, and ensures consistent success and profits for both the buyer and the seller.

If you’re unhappy with your sales productivity and are not converting enough of your prospects into repeat customers, this will be the most important seminar you attend this year. With her internationally acclaimed training approach and no-holds-barred focus on results, Colleen demonstrates The New Rules of Sales Success for enhancing sales productivity that leads to consistently flawless sales results in today’s new economy. With the strategies and tactics Colleen presents, you’ll learn how to sell more, in less time, at a higher profit, including:

• Reduce sales cycles by up to 30% by learning why people are afraid to buy and how to overcome these objections
• Use the fine line between persistence and stalking to achieve an instant 80% increase in call-back ratios.
• Implement the top 7 activities of high performers to reduce sales cycles by 30%
• Increase your average order size by 50%; by moving your clients from satisfied to emotionally connected and loyal

Where's the Profit in That? Five Steps for Negotiating Based on Value - Not Price

In today’s highly competitive marketplace, closing the sale on your terms and with balanced profits showing for you and the customer is no longer negotiable, it’s a requirement. To succeed today, every salesperson needs to know how to negotiate and close a sale without giving in, without losing a potential customer, all while answering the question on every customers mind: where’s the win for me?

Especially in today’s emerging new economy, there is not a single sales profession who can afford not to be selling value rather than price. Regardless if you sell $10 items to homeowners, $1 million IT services to the Fortune 500 or executive recruiting, to the government.

Colleen’s 5 Steps Model for Selling Value Not Price will totally transform your entire experience of selling –and your income. With her dynamic presentation style, wealth of front line sales experience and unwavering focus on getting results, Colleen shares her guaranteed method for maximizing your results each time you present your solutions to a buyer. Through her unique 5-Step Process for Selling Value – Not Price you’ll learn how to defend against objections, keep your price firm, your customers loyal – and permanently increase your bottom line by easily closing the most profitable deals.

Everyone can convert their sales pitch into a value proposition, using Colleen’s model. But you’d better be ready for different, provocative, challenging ideas – that are proven to work in today’s new economy. This is NOT the ‘run-of-the-mill’ decade’s old selling information.” These are Colleen’s exclusive 5 steps for making any sale at your price and eliminating the competition, including:

– Obtain unprecedented sales success through negative planning
– Why Pollyanna positive thinking will limit your income
– The crucial distinction between rejection and refusal and how it can make selling agonizingly painful or a walk in the park
– How to close 80% of negotiations without dropping your price.
– Find out why “no money” “no power” and “no time” are about priorities, not resources, and how to brush them aside.
– Learn why the buyer can’t say “no need” if you’ve done your job.
– How to be firm, without appearing inflexible.
– Learn how to control the language to control the negotiation.

Creating a Nonstop Sales Boom: Putting an End to Boom-and-Bust Sales Cycles

How many times have you or someone on your team come off a great month or quarter, only to find that the pipeline is woefully empty. This is one of the most common problems that sales organizations face: great results followed by several periods of missed-quotas.

Worst of all, this is considered by many organizations to be the “norm” and simply accept poor performance and the stresses of up and down results.

Why does this happen? In short, it can have a lot to do with complacency, consistency and a far too narrow view of the role of sales. Simply put, sellers need to look at their job as more than just moving leads to close.
We need to look at the entire client lifecycle. In Creating a Nonstop Sales Boom, Colleen will introduce the critical activities all sellers review the four critical stages of client engagement:

– Attraction – the activities sellers need to do to attract new prospects. It isn’t just up to marketing.
– Participation – effectively qualifying the buyer, getting them to buy and get on-boarded quickly – they can’t grow if they’ve not implemented.
– Growth – how to enhance the value to your client.
– Leverage – how to have clients advocating on your behalf and becoming your secret sales force.

When sellers concentrate on only one or two of these areas, their results become erratic. With the field-tested strategies in this session, participants will learn how to systematically attract a regular flow of prospects and move them smoothly through the pipeline – and beyond.

Colleen will introduce Sales Radar™ to help sellers visualize and implement this way of looking at the client relationship. Typically sellers see themselves working with clients in a linear fashion, restricting the overall ability to generate revenue Sales Radar provides an invaluable tool to reinforce the opportunities that exists with clients at all stages of their life cycle.

Protect Your Turf: How to Retain and Leverage Your Current Clients for Increased Sales

All too often sales and marketing teams ignore the single most profitable source of revenue opportunities: their current customers. In today’s competitive, fast-paced marketplace, there is intense pressure for that next deal. And unfortunately, that often leaves driving the buying process to become more complicated with additional stakeholders and influencers in the decision making for a purchase. That means that each client has increasing numbers of relationships that must be managed.

Even when organizations maintain contact with one recent client decision maker, the other key stakeholders throughout the company are often forgotten. Not only does that make it more difficult to reinitiate relationships in the future, it also provides entry points to the competition.

In the end, without maintaining those relationships in the right way, the ultimate promise of selling to existing customers – with less time and cost than new customers – is lost, potentially forever.

In the program Protect Your Turf! How to Retain and Leverage Your Current Customers for Increased Sales, Colleen will detail the specific steps for leveraging current customers for faster and more profitable sales. All while keeping the competition at bay!

Be warned, Colleen does not deal in cliché, glib, or eye rolling techniques for managing your clients – those techniques from the past that leave organizations looking and sounding like everyone else, including their competition! Instead, let Colleen share the specific steps to building long lasting, loyal and profitable client relationships, including:

– Turning customer success into a permanent increase in profits without sacrificing new business development.
– Learn the top reasons why customers leave and what to do about it.
– Learn how to be heard above the 8000 marketing and sales messages clients hear each day by delivering the right unique message, and the most profitable medium, at the right time.
– Create loyalty (and more sales) with 6 attention-getting tactics that get inside the client’s mind and stay there.
– Discover the worst experience you can give your customer.
– Learn how to connect with clients up to 200 times a year and have clients welcome it!

Why You Need Colleen

As the Founder and President of Engage Selling Solutions, Colleen is driven by a passion for sales – and results. A successful sales leader for over 20 years, she understands the challenges of selling in today’s market and that business leaders can no longer rely on approaches to sales based on techniques from decades ago.

Colleen works with business and sales leaders to design, implement and hone their sales teams to seize market opportunities. Whether designing strategy to target a new market or working with a team to improve their productivity, Colleen’s results have attracted clients such as Merck, Abbott, Merrill Lynch, Royal Bank of Canada, Dow AgroSciences, Adecco, Trend Micro, UBM, and over 1,000 other leading organizations.

Time and time again, clients who work with Colleen note her frank, no-nonsense approach to solving problems and addressing opportunities. Colleen’s practical strategies deliver results.

Colleen is the author of the popular “Nonstop Sales Boom” and “Honesty Sells” books. She has been distinguished as a Certified Sales Professional (C.S.P.), is a past President of the Canadian Association of Professional Speakers and is a member of the Canadian Speaking Hall of Fame. Sales and Marketing Magazine has called Colleen and Engage Selling: one of the top 5 most effective sales training organizations in the market today!

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Why You Will Love Colleen

“By the end of my first year working directly with Colleen, I exceeded my sales target by 161 percent. It was no fluke.”

José CrossDirector of Sales, Ericsson

“Colleen takes the time to understand your requirements and tailor her sales training solutions to your specific needs, even taking into account individuals within the team. Her training has resulted in many “aha!” moments for my sales team, and our steadily increasing sales show the training is having an effect. Highly personable, trustworthy and consistent, you would be hard pressed to hire better than Colleen.”

Tim WelchAVP, Grand & Toy

“I have worked with some excellent sales consultants over my 24 years in business, and it takes a lot to impress me. However, Colleen has rightfully earned my praise and respect. She would be able to help any organization uncover issues affecting its sales and offer concrete solutions.”